William Morris and E. Belfort Bax

Socialism From The Root Up - Chapter 1 - Ancient Society

In beginning this series on Socialism, we think it
necessary to prelude the matter which may appear to interest more immediately us
now living, by a brief allusion to the history of the past.

Our adversaries are sometimes forward to remind us that the present system with
which we are so discontented, has been made by the growth of ages, and that our
wills are impotent to change it; they do not see that in stating this fact they are
condemning their own position. Our business is to recognize the coming change, to
clear away obstacles to it, to accept it, and to be ready to organize it in detail.
Our opponents, on the contrary, are trying consciously to stay that very evolution
at the point which it has reached to-day; they are attempting to turn the transient
into the eternal; therefore, for them history has no lessons, while to us it gives
both encouragement and warning which we cannot afford to disregard. The hopes for
the industrialism of the future are involved in its struggles in the past; which,
indeed, since they have built up the present system, and placed us amidst its
struggle towards change, have really forced us whether we will it or not, to help
forward that change.

The modern civilized State has been developed by the antagonism between individual
and social interests, which has transformed primitive Society into Civilization.
The conditions of mere savage life recognized nothing but the satisfaction of the
immediate needs of the individual; this condition of complete want of co-operation
yielded to primitive Communism as the powers of man grew, and he began to perceive
that he could do more than satisfy his daily needs for food and shelter. By this
time he had found that he could aid nature in forcing the earth to produce
livelihood for him; the hill and forest became something more to him than the place
where berries and roots grew, and wild creatures lived, the land became pasture
ground to him, and at last amid some races ground for tillage.

But the wealth of man still grew, and change came again with its growth; the land
was common in the sense that it was not the property of individuals, but it was not
common to all comers; primitive society was formed, and man was no longer a mass of
individuals, but the groups of this primitive society were narrow and exclusive;
the unit of Society was the Gens, a group of blood-relations at peace
among themselves, but which group was hostile to all other groups; within the Gens
wealth was common to all its members, without it wealth was prize of war.

This condition of war necessarily developed leadership amongst men; successful
warriors gained predominance over the other members of the Gens, and since the
increasing powers of production afforded more wealth to be disposed of above the
mere necessities of each man, these warrior leaders began to get to themselves
larger shares of the wealth than others, and so the primitive communism of wealth
began to be transformed into individual ownership.

The Tribe now took the place of the Gens; this was a larger and more artificial
group, in which blood relationship was conventionally assumed. In it, however,
there was by no means mere individual ownership, although, as said above, Communism
had been broken into; the tribe at large disposed of the use of the land according
to certain arbitrary arrangements, but did not admit ownership in it to
individuals. Under the tribal system also slavery was developed, so that class
Society had fairly began (sic).

The Tribe in its turn melted into a larger and still more artificial body, the
People -- a congeries of many tribes, the ancient Gothic-Teutonic name for which --
theoth- is still preserved in such names as Theobald. This was the last
development of Barbarism; nor was there much change in the conditions of wealth
under it from those obtaining among the Tribe, although it held in it something
more than the mere germs of feudalism.

Finally, ancient Barbarism was transformed into ancient Civilization, which, as the
name implies, took the form of the life of the city. With these cities political
life began, together with the systematization of the old beliefs into a regular
worship. The religion of Barbarism was the worship of the ancestors of the tribe,
mingled with fetichism, which was the first universal religion, and may best be
described as a state of mind in which the universe was conceived of as a system of
animated beings to be feared and propitiated by man. This was transformed into what
may be called city patriotism, which summed up the whole religion of the city, and
which was the real religion of the Greeks and Romans in their progressive period,
and of all the then progressive races of mankind, including the Hebrew. In these cities slavery speedily developed until it
embraced nearly the whole of industrialism, the main business of the free citizens
being the aggrandizement of their city by war (1).
For the cities were as hostile to each other as the tribes had been.

The course of events towards further transformation was that in the East the cities
formed federations which gradually fell under the domination of bureaucratic and
absolute monarchies, of which China still remains as an example. The Greek and
Latin cities carried on the progress of human intelligence, but did not escape
corruption and transformation.

Amongst the Greeks the individual struggle for pre-eminence gradually broke down
the city patriotism, and led the way towards the domination of mere military and
political intrigue and confusion, till the independence of Greece was finally
trampled out by the power of Rome, now corrupted also. For during this time in Rome
the struggle of the plebeian order -- or inferior tribes of which the city was
composed -- with the conservative oligarchy -- that is, the three most ancient and
consequently leading tribes -- had developed a middle-class living on the profits
derived from slave labour, which broke up the old city republic and led to the
formation of a commercial and tax-gathering empire, founded on slavery, whose
subjects were devoid of all political rights, and in which the triumph of
individualism was complete. Indeed, this same struggle had taken place in one way
or another in the Greek cities also. Thus was all public spirit extinguished. The
natural greed of commercialism gradually ate up the wealth of the empire: even
slave labour became unprofitable. The landlords were ruined; the taxes could not be
paid; and meanwhile the Roman soldier, once a citizen religiously devoted to his
city, became a bribed hireling, till at last no bribe was high enough to induce a
civilized man to fight, and the Roman legions were manned by the very barbarians
whose kinsmen were attacking the empire from without.

Thus was ancient civilization delivered over to the Barbarians, fresh from their
tribal communism, and once more the antagonism of individual and common rights was
exemplified in the two streams of Barbarian and Roman ideas, from the union of
which was formed the society of the next great epoch -- the Middle Ages.

1 The Greeks added to this the practice of the
higher arts and literature, neither of which the Romans possessed in their
progressive period. back